Petrodollar Faces Growing Threat From the East. Payments in Gold Across Asia

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• Petrodollar Faces Growing Threat From the East. Payments in Gold Across Asia
  by Andrew Brennan, Asia Times, via http://www.globalresearch.ca/
  While the recent raft of Sino-Saudi trade agreements benefited Chinese soft power in protecting Xinjiang, and the Saudis by diversifying their economy, China’s slow intertwining with Saudi Arabia complements the Sino-Russian alliance. Primarily, its benefits could lead to a realistic threat to the petrodollar.
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  The Persian rival who showed the way
  In 2012/2013, the US Treasury Department, under the Obama administration, initiated a raft of sanctions in an amateurish fashion against the Central Bank of Iran. As we were told, it was done to tire and bleed Iranian economic and social life enough to draw Tehran into negotiations concerning its nuclear programme. The argument of were they/weren’t they pursuing a weaponized nuclear program isn’t important; how the Iranians circumvented these sanctions is.
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  The sanctions were meant to be stifling, but the Iranians loosened this problematic liquidity noose by using all their banks that weren’t sanctioned, and sold rich Iranian oil to India. Of course, the Indians couldn’t pay Tehran directly. Neither could they pay bilaterally in rupees due to sanctions and infrastructure needed to trade in a bilateral currency. Instead, Iran requested that India pay in gold so India paid Turkey, the Middle East’s gold market, and Turkey gave Turkish gold to Iranian banks, which then swapped with the Central Bank of Iran.
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  Turkey, for its part, may soon be the gold payment intermediator across Asia, and is already nationalizing the sector with a demand for private confiscation occurring to support the Turkish economy, but this has scarcely been reported.
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  This clever evasion was known as the Iran-India-Turkey triangle. Iran was escaping the dominance of the US dollar and trading in real money, not a hegemonic fiat currency that was being printed hot-off-the-press all day. They were dealing in gold; not something that could be strangled through SWIFT and electrons traded on a screen easily. A simple intermediator and precious metals could break Obama’s heralded “crippling” sanctions.
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  Iran ideologically, as well as practically, wants nothing to do with the US dollar but rather it wants to be free of monetary pressures by the US on its domestic policies. The effectiveness of this evasion was a preview to what countries like China, Russia, and to a lesser extent India and South Korea, have all been trying to do: increase their independence from the US dollar. The Iranian gold triangle showed successful independence from US dollar reliance.
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